The Deceiver

by Frederick Forsyth

  Bruno Morenz was slightly ahead of time. Just south of the border, he killed twenty-five minutes at the Frankenwald service area restaurant. He did not drink liquor; he drank coffee. But he filled his hip flask.

  At five to eleven that Tuesday morning Sam McCready, with Kit Johnson beside him, was concealed amid pine trees on a hill south of the Saale River. The Range Rover was parked out of sight in the forest. From the treeline they could see the West German border post below and half a mile in front of them. Beyond it was a gap in the hills, and through the gap, the roofs of the East German border post, half a mile farther on.

  Because the East Germans had built their controls well inside their own territory, a driver would be inside East Germany as soon as he left the West German post. Then came a two-lane highway between high chain-link fencing. Behind the fencing were the watchtowers. From the trees, using powerful binoculars, McCready could see the border guards behind the windows with their own field glasses, watching the West. He could also see the machine guns. The reason for the half-mile corridor inside East Germany was so that anyone bursting through the eastern border post could be cut to pieces between the chain-link fencing before reaching the West.

  At two minutes to eleven, McCready picked out the black BMW moving sedately through the cursory West German controls. Then it purred forward into the corridor, heading for the land controlled by the East’s most professional and dreaded secret police, the Stasi.

  Chapter 3

  “It’s the bathroom, it has to be the bathroom,” said Commissar Schiller just after seven A.M. as he led a sleepy and reluctant Wiechert back into the flat.

  “It looks all right to me,” grumbled Wiechert. “Anyway, the forensic boys cleaned it out.”

  “They were looking for prints, not measurements,” said Schiller. “Look at this closet in the passage. It’s two yards wide, right?”

  “About that.”

  “The far end is flush with the door to the call girl’s bedroom. The door is flush with the wall and the mirror above the headboard. Now, as the bathroom door is beyond the built-in wall closet, what do you deduce?”

  “That I’m hungry,” said Wiechert.

  “Shut up. Look, when you enter the bathroom and turn to your right, there should be two yards to the bathroom wall. The width of the cupboard outside, right? Try it.”

  Wiechert entered the bathroom and looked to his right. “One yard,” he said.

  “Exactly. That’s what puzzled me. Between the mirror behind the washbasin and the mirror behind the headboard, there’s a yard of space missing.”

  Poking around in the hall closet, it took Schiller thirty minutes to find the door catch, a cunningly concealed knothole in the pine planking. When the rear of the closet swung open, Schiller could dimly discern a light switch inside. He used a pencil to flick the switch, and the inner light came on, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Wiechert, looking over his shoulder. The secret compartment was ten feet long, the same length as the bathroom, but it was only three feet wide. But wide enough. To their right was the rear side of the mirror above the headboard next door, a one-way mirror that exposed the whole bedroom. On a tripod at the center of the mirror, facing into the bedroom, was a video camera, a state-of-the-art high-tech piece of equipment that would certainly provide clear-definition film despite shooting through the glass and into subdued lighting. The sound-recording equipment was also of the best. The entire far end of the narrow passageway was ceiling-to-floor shelving, and each shelf held a row of video-cassette cases. On the spine of each was a label, and each label had a number. Schiller backed out.

  The phone was usable, since the forensic men had cleaned it of prints the previous day. He called the Präsidium and got straight through to Rainer Hartwig, Director of First K.

  “Oh shit,” said Hartwig when he had the details. “Well done. Stay there. I’ll get two fingerprint men down to you.”

  It was eight-fifteen. Dieter Aust was shaving. In the bedroom the morning show was on television. The news roundup. He could hear it from the bathroom. He thought little of the item about a double murder in Hahnwald until the newscaster said, “One of the victims, high-class call girl Renate Heimendorf.

  That was when the Director of the Cologne BND cut himself quite badly on his pink cheek. In ten minutes he was in his car and driving fast to his office, where he arrived almost an hour early. This much disconcerted Fräulein Keppel, who was always in an hour ahead of him.

  “That number,” said Aust, “the vacation contact number Morenz gave us. Let me have it, would you?”

  When he tried it, he got the “disconnected” tone. He checked with the operator down in the Black Forest, a popular vacation area, but she told him it appeared to be out of order. He did not know that one of McCready’s men had rented a vacation chalet, then locked it after taking the phone off the hook. As a long shot Aust tried Morenz’s home number in Porz, and to his amazement he found himself speaking to Frau Morenz. They must have come home early.

  “Could I speak to your husband please? This is Director Aust speaking, from the office.”

  “But he’s with you, Herr Direktor,” she explained patiently. “Out of town. On a trip. Back late tomorrow night.”

  “Ah, yes, I see. Thank you, Frau Morenz.”

  He put the phone down, worried. Morenz had lied. What was he up to? A weekend with a girlfriend in the Black Forest? Possible, but he did not like it. He put through a secure-line call to Pullach and spoke to the Deputy Director of the Operations Directorate, the division they both worked for. Dr. Lothar Herrmann was frosty. But he listened intently.

  “The murdered call girl, and her pimp. How were they killed?” Herrmann asked.

  Aust consulted the Stadt-Anzeiger lying on his desk.

  “They were shot.”

  “Does Morenz have a personal sidearm?” asked the voice from Pullach.

  “I, er—believe so.”

  “Where was it issued, by whom, and when?” asked Dr. Herrmann. Then he added, “No matter, it must have been here. Stay there, I will call you back.”

  He was back on the phone in ten minutes.

  “He has a Walther PPK, Service issue. From here. It was tested on the range and in the lab before we gave it to him. Ten years ago. Where is it now?”

  “It should be in his personal safe,” said Aust.

  “Is it?” asked Herrmann coldly.

  “I will find out and call you back,” said the badly flustered Aust. He had the master key for all the safes in the department. Five minutes later, he was talking to Herrmann again.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “He might have taken it home, of course.”

  “That is strictly forbidden. So is lying to a superior officer, whatever the cause. I think I had better come to Cologne. Please meet me off the next plane from Munich. Whichever it is, I will be on it.”

  Before leaving Pullach, Dr. Herrmann made three phone calls. As a result, Black Forest policemen would visit the designated vacation home, let themselves in with the landlord’s key, and establish that the phone was off the hook but the bed had not been slept in. At all. That was what they would report. Dr. Herrmann landed at Cologne at five to twelve.

  Bruno Morenz cruised the BMW into the complex of concrete buildings that made up the East German border control and was waved into an inspection bay. A green-uniformed guard appeared at the driver’s side window.

  “Aussteigen, bitte. Ihre Papiere.”

  He climbed out and offered his passport. Other guards began to surround the car, all quite normal.

  “Hood open, please, and trunk.”

  He opened both; they began the search. A mirror on a trolley went under the car. A man pored over the engine bay. Morenz forced himself not to look as the guard studied the battery.

  “The purpose of your journey to the German Democratic Republic?”

  He brought his eyes back to the man in front of him. Blue eyes behin
d rimless glasses stared at him. He explained he was going to Jena, to discuss purchases of optical lenses from Zeiss; that if all went well, he might be able to return that same evening; if not he would have to have a second meeting with the foreign sales director in the morning. Impassive faces. They waved him into the Custom Hall.

  It’s all just normal, he told himself. Let them find the papers themselves, McCready had said. Don’t offer too much. They went through his attaché case, studied the letters exchanged between Zeiss and BKI in Würzburg. Morenz prayed the stamps and postmarks were perfect. They were. His bags were closed. He took them back to the car. The inspection of the car was finished. A guard with a huge Alsatian stood nearby. Behind windows, two men in civilian clothes watched. Secret police.

  “Enjoy your visit to the German Democratic Republic,” said the senior border guard. He did not look as if he meant it.

  At that moment there was a scream and several shouts from the column of cars across the concrete dividing reservation, the column trying to get out. Everyone spun around to look. Morenz was back behind the wheel. He stared in horror.

  There was a blue Combi minivan at the head of the column. West German plates. Two guards were dragging a young girl out of the back, where they had discovered her hiding under the floor in a recess built for the purpose. She was screaming. The girlfriend of the West German youth driving the van. He was hauled out in a circle of straining dogs’ muzzles and submachine gun barrels. He threw his hands up, bone white.

  “Leave her alone, you assholes,” he shouted. Someone hit him in the stomach. He doubled over.

  “Los. Go,” snapped the guard beside Morenz. He let the clutch in, and the BMW surged forward. He cleared the barriers and stopped at the People’s Bank to change Deutschmarks into worthless Ostmarks at one-for-one and get his currency declaration stamped. The bank teller was subdued. Morenz’s hands were shaking. Back in his car he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the youth and the girl being hauled into a concrete building, still screaming.

  He drove north, sweating profusely, his nerve completely gone, a burnt-out case. The only thing that held him together was his years of training—and his conviction that he would not let his friend McCready down.

  Though he knew drinking and driving was utterly forbidden in the GDR, he reached for his hip flask and took a swig. Better. Much better. He drove on steadily. Not too fast, not too slow. He checked his watch. He had time. Midday. Rendezvous at four P.M. Two hours’ drive away. But the fear, the gnawing fear of an agent on a black mission facing ten years in a slave labor camp if caught, was still working on a nervous system already reduced to ruins.

  McCready had watched him enter the corridor between the two border posts, then lost sight of him. He had not seen the incident of the girl and the youth. The curve of the hill meant he could see only the roofs on the East German side and the great flag with the hammer, compasses, and wheatsheaf fluttering above them. Just before twelve, far in the distance, he made out the black BMW driving away into Thuringia.

  In the back of the Range Rover, Johnson had what looked like a suitcase. Inside was a portable telephone, with a difference. The set could send out or receive messages in clear talk, but scrambled, from the British Government Communication Headquarters, or GCHQ, near Cheltenham in England, or Century House in London, or SIS Bonn Station. The handset looked like an ordinary portable phone, with numbered buttons for dialing. McCready had asked that it be brought along so he could stay in touch with his own base and inform them when Poltergeist came safely home.

  “He’s through,” McCready remarked to Johnson. “Now we just wait.”

  “Want to tell Bonn or London?” asked Johnson.

  McCready shook his head. “There’s nothing they can do,” he said. “Nothing anyone can do now. It’s up to Poltergeist.”

  At the flat in Hahnwald, the two fingerprint men had finished with the secret compartment and were on their way. They had lifted three sets of prints from inside the room.

  “Are they among the ones you got yesterday?” asked Schiller.

  “I don’t know,” said the senior print-man. “I’ll have to check back at the lab. Let you know. Anyway, you can go in there now.”

  Schiller entered and surveyed the racks of cassette boxes at the back. There was nothing to indicate what was in them, just numbers on the spine. He took one at random, went into the master bedroom, and slotted it into the video. With the remote control he switched both TV and video on, then hit the “play” button. He sat on the edge of the stripped bed. Two minutes later, he stood up and switched the set off, a rather shaken young man.

  “Donnerwetter nochmal!” whispered Wiechert, standing in the doorway munching a pizza.

  The senator from Baden-Württemberg may only have been a provincial politician, but he was well known nationally for his frequent appearances on national television, calling for a return to earlier moral values and a ban on pornography. His constituents had seen him photographed in many poses—patting children’s heads, kissing babies, opening church fêtes, addressing the conservative ladies. But they probably had not seen him crawling naked around a room in a spiked dog collar attached to a leash held by a young woman in stiletto heels brandishing a riding crop.

  “Stay here,” said Schiller. “Don’t leave, don’t even move. I’m going back to the Präsidium.”

  It was two o’clock.

  Morenz checked his watch. He was well west of the Hermsdorfer Kreuz, the major crossroad where the north-south Autobahn from Berlin to the Saale River border crosses the east-west highway from Dresden to Erfurt. He was ahead of time. He wanted to be at the lay-by for the rendezvous with Smolensk at ten to four—no earlier or it would look suspicious, being parked there for so long in a West German car.

  In fact, to stop at all would invite curiosity. West German businessmen tended to go straight to their destination, do their business, and drive back out again. Better to keep driving. He decided to go past Jena and Weimar to the Erfurt pull-off, go right around the roundabout, and come back toward Weimar. That would kill time. A green and white Wartburg People’s Police car came past him in the overtaking lane, adorned with two blue lights and an outsize bullhorn on the roof. The two uniformed highway patrolmen stared at him With expressionless faces.

  He held the wheel steady, fighting down the rising panic. “They know,” a small treacherous voice inside him kept saying. “It’s all a trap. Smolensk has been blown. You’re going to be set up. They’ll be waiting for you. They’re just checking because you’ve overshot the turnoff.”

  “Don’t be silly,” his cogent mind urged. Then he thought of Renate, and the black despair joined hands with the fear, and the fear was winning.

  “Listen, you fool,” said his mind, “you did something stupid. But you didn’t mean to do it. Then you kept your head. The bodies won’t be discovered for weeks. By then, you’ll be out of the Service, out of the country, with your savings, in a land where they’ll leave you alone. In peace. That’s all you want now—peace. To be left alone. And they’ll leave you alone because of the tapes.”

  The People’s Police, or VOPO, car slowed and studied him. He began to sweat. The fear was rising and still winning. He could not know that the young policemen were car buffs and had not seen the new BMW sedan before.

  Commissar Schiller spent thirty minutes with the Director of First K, the Murder Squad, explaining what he had found. Hartwig bit his lip.

  “It’s going to be a bastard,” he said. “Had she started blackmailing already, or was this to be her retirement fund? We don’t know.”

  He lifted the phone and was put through to the forensic lab.

  “I want the photographs of the recovered bullets and the prints—the nineteen of yesterday and the three of this morning—in my office in one hour.” Then he rose and turned to Schiller.

  “Come on. We’re going back. I want to see this place for myself.”

  It was actually Director Hartwig who found
the notebook. Why anyone should be so secretive as to hide a notebook in a room that was already so well hidden, he could not imagine. But it was taped under the lowest shelf where the videos were stored.

  The list was, they would discover, in Renate Heimendorf’s handwriting. Clearly she had been a very clever woman, and this was her operation—from the skillful refurbishment of the original apartment to the harmless-looking remote control that could turn the camera behind the mirror on or off. The forensic boys had seen it in the bedroom but had thought it was a spare for the TV.

  Hartwig ran through the names in the notebook, which corresponded with the numbers on the spines of the video-cassettes. Some he recognized, some not. The ones he did not know, he reckoned would be men from out of state, but important men. The ones he recognized included two senators, a parliamentarian (government party), a financier, a banker (local), three industrialists, the heir to a major brewery, a judge, a famous surgeon, and a nationally known television personality. Eight names appeared to be Anglo-Saxon (British? American? Canadian?), and two French. He counted the rest.

  “Eighty-one names,” he said. “Eighty-one tapes. Christ, if the names I do recognize are anything to go by, there must be enough here to bring down several state governments, maybe Bonn itself.”

  “That’s odd,” said Schiller. “There are only sixty-one tapes.”

  They both counted them. Sixty-one.

  “You say there were three sets of prints lifted here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Assuming two were from Heimendorf and Hoppe, the third is probably the killer. And I have a horrible feeling he’s taken twenty tapes with him. Come on—I’m going to the President with this. It’s got beyond a murder, way beyond.”

  Dr. Herrmann was finishing lunch with his subordinate, Aust.

  “My dear Aust, we know nothing as yet. We simply have reason for concern. The police may quickly arrest and charge a gangster, and Morenz may return on schedule after a sinful weekend with a girlfriend at someplace other than the Black Forest. I have to say that his immediate retirement with loss of pension is beyond a doubt. But for the moment, I just want you to try and trace him. I want a female operative to move in with his wife in case he calls. Use any excuse you like. I will attempt to find out just what is the state of the police investigation. You know my hotel. Contact me if there is news of him.”